Back in California, Hedren continued modeling and began auditioning for film and television work. Her face was recognizable from the magazine covers, but recognition was not the same as a film career, and a film career required the specific attention of the specific people who made films. She was working and visible but not yet in pictures when something happened that changed everything: Alfred Hitchcock saw a commercial.
## Hitchcock and The Birds
The commercial was for a diet drink, and Hedren appeared in it, and Alfred Hitchcock was watching television and saw her. Hitchcock in October 1961 was the most commercially successful filmmaker in the world — his television program, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, had been on the air since 1955, and his films Rear Window (1954), Vertigo (1958), North by Northwest (1959), and Psycho (1960) had collectively established him as the defining commercial auteur of Hollywood cinema. He was also, by 1961, someone who exercised an unusual degree of control over his productions, including the selection and management of his leading actresses.
He had a specific type. The controlled blonde — cool on the surface, something more volatile underneath — appeared in film after film of his late career. Grace Kelly had been the original; after Kelly left Hollywood for Monaco, Hitchcock had worked with Kim Novak in Vertigo and with various others. When he saw Hedren in the commercial, he saw something he was looking for, and he arranged a meeting.
The screen test he gave her was expensive and elaborate. He put her in a wardrobe of specific clothes, cast her opposite an established actor, filmed her in multiple scenarios. He studied the results carefully. He offered her a seven-year exclusive contract, which she accepted. The contract bound her to him before she had made a single professional film appearance.